VAuroch comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 January 2010 04:35PM

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Comment author: AndyWood 20 January 2010 07:24:01PM *  27 points [-]

This is overwhelmingly how I perceive most people. This in particular: 'reality is social'.

I have personally traced the difference, in myself, to receiving this book at around the age of three or four. It has illustrations of gadgets and appliances, with cut-out views of their internals. I learned almost as soon as I was capable of learning, that nothing is a mysterious black box, things that seem magical have internal detail, and there are explanations for how they work. Whether or not I had anything like a pre-existing disposition that made me love and devour the book in the first place, I still consider it to have had a bigger impact on my whole world view than anything else I can remember.

Comment author: VAuroch 31 December 2013 07:35:51PM 2 points [-]

I got Macaulay's The Way Things Work (the original) at a slightly higher age. I suspect a big reason I became a computer scientist was the joy of puzzling through the adder diagrams and understanding why they worked.

Comment author: Nisan 23 January 2014 11:35:10PM 1 point [-]

I traced those adder diagrams as a child as well, and it surely was a formative experience.